Policy —

Human rights groups slam Special 301 Report

The Special 301 report issued by the US Trade Representative has always been …

Those who follow the US government's "Special 301" watch list knows that the annual report is often the subject of jokes, such as regulators simply making a list of countries that annoy them, with a special disdain for Canada. Now, a number of human rights groups are speaking out against Special 301, arguing that the Obama Administration has failed to live up to its promises to fix parts of the Special 301 process that would help some countries get access to drugs that would treat AIDS and other diseases.

The groups include the Health Global Access Project, the Foundation for AIDS Rights, and the Deli Network of People Living with HIV, and are being led by the American University Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). PIJIP associate director Sean Flynn said that the groups plan to file a complaint over the Special 301 report on Tuesday, at which time a press conference will be held at the Media Center at the International AIDS Conference 2010 in Vienna.

According to Flynn, President Obama promised to "break the stranglehold that a few big drug and insurance companies have on these life-saving drugs," but has failed to take sufficient action, as evidenced by the 2009 and 2010 Special 301 reports. "This complaint will allege that the continuation of Special 301 attacks on policies promoting access to affordable medications abroad violates international human rights obligations," Flynn said in a statement.

The complaint will argue that the US breaches international human rights obligations by using the Special 301 report to threaten countries that don't tighten their intellectual property laws to the US's satisfaction. Many of the countries named in the report already meet the WTO TRIPS agreement, but that's not usually enough to stay off the list. The human rights groups feel that countries should be encouraged to utilize the IP exceptions in the TRIPS agreement in order to promote access to medication, and that the US shouldn't be encouraging developing nations to accept standards that don't take into account these exceptions.

Flynn and gang aren't the only ones who have complained about the Special 301 process. Some believe that the placement of certain countries on the list is often made for purely political or foreign policy reasons. Others, such as CCIA attorney Matt Schruers, say that the process tries to push idealistic standards onto other countries: "Certain submissions in this process have suffered from a sort of mission creep growing from disputes about enforcement to disputes about what ideal, substantive technical intellectual policy would look like," Schruers said earlier this year.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui